iTunes won't recognize song info imported from hard drive

Its not an iTunes problem, its a .wav problem. The .wav format does not support tagging, so the .wav files do not have written into them any information on artist/track/album. If you had, for example, ripped to mp3, the tags would be there. In the Mac environment, there are applescripts you can run to recover tag information from directory structure. Unfortunately, applescripts are an OSX feature, not an iTunes feature.

If you do have a Mac, however, you can use the applescripts to recover the tags, export the library to a .xml file, copy the track elements out of the xml file, paste those into a library export from your Win iTunes, do a global search and replace to fix any file references, and then reimport into iTunes.

Or, you can rip with iTunes. From what I gather, iTunes does a good job, almost the equal of EAC.

Why do you want to use .wav files anyway? I've got my tunes ripped to .wavs, but that is because I'm a freaky audiophile that uses a computer for home playback over a high resolution system. But, I've got .aac copies of all the files for my iPod--using .wav files in an iPod takes 10x the space (10x fewer songs) and requires much more disk spinning and processing (=less battery life). Plus, with the audio circuitry in the iPod, the difference isn't as noticeable anyway.

If you're bent on using WAV format only, then I can't help you.

If you want to use Apple Lossless or AAC or something like that, then you need iTunesEncode. It's a command line interface to iTunes as an encoder. You can use it with EAC to have EAC pass the WAVs to iTunes after ripping, and encode to Apple Lossless or AAC or whatever.

Find it here: http://www.rarewares.org/aac.html

Entering album info manually? You know about CDDB, right? You can select "get information from database" and EAC will retrieve the artist/album/tracks from a free database... I had to tweak the entries (i.e., I prefer the artist to be "Hendrix, Jimi" than "Jimi Hendrix"), but it was easier than typing everything.

I feel your pain. I ripped my collection of about 1.5K CDs using EAC. My main rig is Mac Mini -> Waveterminal U24 USB Audio device -> dCS Purcell upsampler -> dCS Delius DAC -> ARC LS-16 II preamp -> 2 x ARC VT 100 IIIs -> Proac RS 3.8s. In another room, I use a WinXP box -> U24 -> Theta IIIA -> ARC LS5 III -> 2 x ARC D240 IIs -> Proac RS 2s. Both sound awesome. Have you thought about using the computer as a source rather than the iPod? The USB audio devices are nice; while the U24 will do DAC duties, it has a coax out. Because its USB, it introduces no jitter for long runs--the only jitter issues are reclocking and a short coax run to the DAC.

Why use apple lossless instead of .wav? Apple lossless is, well, proprietary. If you switch to a different Win player, you won't be able to play 'em (tried foobar 2000?). I maintain a library of .wav files, and duplicate .aac files encoded at 128kbps for use on my iPod...

I ripped the majority of my stuff to a [drive]:/My Music/[artist]/[album]/[title].wav format. If I did it again, I would probably use [drive]:/My Music/[artist]/[year]/[album]/[trkno]_[title].wav. In subsequent indexing, some of that other stuff is useful...

Apple lossless is, well, proprietary. If you switch to a different Win player, you won't be able to play 'em (tried foobar 2000?).

foobar plays Apple Lossless files just fine with foo_alac. And it can convert them to other formats as well, like FLAC or whatever.

Using WAV is just a waste of space. You can compress those to at least 60% of their current size.

Good point; should have checked for a plug-in... Guess I'm still partly using .wav files b/c I also use some Turtle Beach audiotrons in my house, which don't do apple formats. .wav is a lowest common denominator, but maybe I'll have to rethink that if I can recover a quarter TB...

You got me intrigued, but foo_alac doesn't quite seem to be there yet... http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t37345.html

I didn't say it worked well. Part of the problem is that the foobar 0.9 SDK is being withheld (for no good reason that I can see), and so lots of foobar plugin developers aren't modifying/fixing buggy code because until they release the SDK, there's very little point. They'll just have to come back and change it later anyway. There's no good solution for this except to make due as best as possible, foobar being in an endless state of flux like this just hurts the end users, really.

VLC can also play ALAC files, BTW. And there's a plugin for dbPowerAmp that can deal with them too.

Once you get used to the convenience and accessibility of the iPod kind of thing, dropping CDs in a standalone player starts seeming regressive.

Computer based playback can be done cheaply or expensively. If you have a standalone DAC, I do recommend something like the Waveterminal U24, or even an MAudio transit or something. My Mac Mini is actually hooked up to the plasma in my living room, and I've got the bluetooth keyboard and mouse so I can use the 'puter from the couch. With wav files, the set up sounds as good as straight CD playback from my Esoteric DV-50S acting as a transport. Frightening, really.

Then again, if you are running a music server 24x7, the storage can be pricey. Even something like a Buffalo terastation (wav files take up a lot of space) can run you $1K. I actually use a Dell powervault RAID 5 NAS located in another room. Very reliable, but pricey (and even more so when you add in the "quiet" server cabinet.

Good luck w/the iPod!

I've never tried to burn one from compressed files, so I'm not sure. I think I'd probably get iT to recover a .wav from the compressed file, and then burn it. As long as you have a good sized burn buffer, doesn't seem like you would need to defrag... But, my aim was computer access to the music, not reproducing CDs for the car or whatever so I haven't spend much time with that. People swear by black CDs too.

My music server is a Mac Mini attached to a network. Its pretty quiet--the fan is audible when it kicks on, but it only kicks on when the little guy is thinking hard, and audio playback doesn't really seem to tax the processor.

I believe it does it on the fly. The advice you've heard about defragmenting the drive, etc., used to be good advice. CD drives would load data into their buffers, and start writing, and then they'd have problems getting the data they needed, resulting in a buffer underrun (trying to get data out of the buffer when the buffer was empty). Most, if not all, modern CD writers have buffer underrun protection, where this isn't a problem anymore.

Eric

Do you feel that iTunes is suitable as a hi-end music server program? There is a lot of discussion in the DIY audio forums which suggests PCs running Foobar 2000 with certain windows drivers disabled gives sonically superior results.

When you play .wav/ lossless files are you running these from iTunes? If so, are you able to configure iTunes to run these optimally?

I have some information on how to optimise iTunes playing through USB to a DAC, if your DAC accepts USB. This gives higher performance than via S/PDIF.

malcolm